STEAMING BACK TO WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
Around 1802, Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick was working at Coalbrookdale on water pumps when he designed the world’s first railway locomotive. Trevithick had earlier built a steam-powered road vehicle, but quickly realised that the poor, muddy, potholed roads of the day could never support the enormous weight of such machines, and turned his attention to the industrial horse-drawn plateways of the day, conjecturing that their rails might do the job.
That year, the Coalbrookdale company built the locomotive on rails for him, but little is known about it, including whether or not it actually ran. The only known information about it comes from a drawing preserved at the Science Museum, in London, together with a letter written by Trevithick to his friend Davies Giddy.
The drawing, which indicated that the locomotive ran on a 3ft gauge plateway, became used as the basis of all subsequent images and replicas of Trevithick’s Penydarren locomotive, which gave the world’s first public demonstration of a railway engine in 1804, because no plans for that locomotive have survived.
Work on the first locomotive may have been halted by the death in 1803 of Coalbrookdale ironmaster William Reynold who was working on the project, or maybe the publication of a damming letter in a national newspaper from none other than James Watt on the danger of such high-pressure steam inventions could have given the Coalbrookdale management the jitters.
Either way, Coalbrookdale and nearby Ironbridge are hailed as the birthplace on the Industrial Revolution which changed the world forever, not least of all through one of its greatest fruits of all, transport technology through
